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Comment by bryanrasmussen | Hacker News Reader

how many times in the history of computer programming has there been an end to computer programming as we know it, successfully, and how many times predicted?

I can think of one successfully, off hand, although you could probably convince me there was more than one.

the principle phrase being "as we know it", since that implies a large scale change to how it works but it continues afterwards, altered.

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Off the top of my head, I can think of the following during my career:

   1. COBOL (we actually did still use it back in the 80s)

   2.AI back in the 80s (Dr. Dobbs was all concerned about it ...)

   3. RAD

   4. No-Code

   5. Off-shoring

   6. Web 2.0

   7. Web 3.0

   8. possibly the ADA/provably correct push depending on your area of programming

TBH - I think the AI's are nice tools, but they got a long way to go before it's the 'end of computer programming as we know it'

edit: formatting

Stack overflow (and internet in general) changed the programming as we (at least some of us) knew it.

When I was learning programming I had no internet, no books outside of library, nobody to ask for days.

I remember vividly having spent days trying to figure out how to use the stdlib qsort, and not being able to.

Hmm - I'm not sure I'd say that 'changed programming' - but the internet in general changed 'learning to program'. I can remember when I first discovered gopher and found I could read tons recent material for free, or finding stonybrook on the web - that was like a gold mine of algorithms! :-D

I'm not from that generation so that's a bit hard for me to understand. Even if you used a closed-source C compiler, wouldn't you still have been able to look at the header file, which would have been pretty self-explanatory?

E.g.

void qsort(void* base, size_t nmemb, size_t size, int (compar)(const void , const void* ));

And surely if you bought a C compiler, you would have gotten a manual or two with it? Documentation from the pre-Internet age tended to be much better than today.

Yeah - but you have to be a good enough programmer to really understand the headers.. the 'bootstrapping' problem was real :-) Especially if you didn't live in a metropolitan/college area. My local library was really short on programming books - especially anything 'in depth'. Also, 'C' was considered a "professional's language" back then - so bookstores/libraries were more likely to have books on BASIC then 'C'

What kind of modern C wizardry is that? qsort was:

    qsort(base, nel, width, compar)
    char *base;
    int (*compar)();

I don't remember where we got the compilers from but we surely didn't buy them.

Also I don't know if it came with manual but my English wasn't good enough to read them anyways.

COBOL certainly had a lasting impact, but only for some application domains. The rest didn't seem to be particularly successful or impactful. Maybe RAD if you consider office application macros and end user report generation in it. (Spreadsheets extended programming to non-programmers and had a long-lasting impact, but I wouldn't call them RAD.)

Thats sorta the point... at one time or another, those were all projected to be 'the end of programming as we know it'...

Hell, COBOL's origins was in IBM wanting to make programming an 'entry level' occupation.

Oddly enough, spreadsheets had a huge impact (and still run a lot of companies behind the scenes :-P ) But I can't remember anyone claiming they would 'end programming' ?

FWIW I worked for a company from 2002 to 2006 that still had quite a large COBOL team even then. Some of the team members were also in their 20s and they'd been hired and trained up in COBOL.

I started by working on back-end accounting systems - most of those seemed to be COBOL ... or SHUDDER RPG.

OK, those are all ones that didn't change programming as we know it, but some came closer than others right?

I definitely considered some of those in my list of failed revolutions.

My one completely successful revolution is moving from punch card programming.

Oh yeah - thats a good one...

Maybe the move from teletype to CRT's as well ?

hmm, yeah good one. not sure if really changed things as I guess you still programmed the same, but maybe.

Someone compared LLM in 2020s to GUI in 80s and 90s. Graphical interfaces didn't replace text interface, but it just became additional to it.

What's the one successful one? Visicalc?

I would say the one that definitely changed programming was moving from the punch card era. A lot of these others that people are mentioning I don't think really changed programming, they just looked like they were going to.

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